‘Sticky' attention: Children with autism's ability to disengage their attention without an external cue

Background: An important aspect of social-communicative functioning is children’s ability to disengage and shift attention from one stimulus to another. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism appear to have difficulty, indicated by slower eye movements to a second stimulus. Previous studies examining disengagement have utilized a visual orientation task, where a peripheral stimulus is presented while a central fixation remains (disengagement) or disappears (shifting). In previous research, the peripheral stimulus provides an indication for children to shift attention. It is unknown if the observed difficulties in shifting attention are specific to these single-shift paradigms. The present study aims to understand children’s ability to disengage attention beyond the first shift, in a self-directed task, in order to understand limitations in ongoing, ‘in-line attention’ capabilities.

Objectives: To examine how children with autism’s attention abilities are controlled when the cue to disengage must be self-generated versus externally cued, providing a better representation of their shifting capabilities in their everyday interactions with the environment.

Methods: Numbers and durations of eye fixations are compared to typically developing children matched for age and verbal ability. Children were presented with two separate images on the right and left sides of a screen. Stimuli were divided into high (man reciting story), low (man counting) and non-linguistic (mouestrap) conditions, which were further categorized by high and low emotion.

Results: If disengagement of attention is an in-line problem, effecting more than the first attention shift, then number of and time between fixations should be fewer and longer for the autism group; stimulus type and emotion level may also iinfluence the findings (Bahrick et-al., IMFAR poster 2007). Data are collected and currently being analyzed.

Conclusions: This study addresses an important difference between attention skills in tasks which require frequent disengagement and shifting of attention (“in-line attention”) versus single-shift paradigms.